o stand and look at Basil Beattie’s paintings is an
experience like the act of painting itself: it is a physical
encounter-bodily, concrete and palpable, as well as being an
event which takes place in the eye and in the imagination.
The inescapable physicality of Beattie’s painting has been
a constant throughout his career, as has been a liking for
improvised composition and a raw, intimate touch. Yet this
materiality is never heavy-handed, and a signal feature of
these works is their orchestration of differences - between
density and openness, between the wrenched, jerky handling
of some forms counterpoised with a calligraphic, light
touch, displayed at perfect ease with itself, elsewhere in
the same painting. Sometimes weighty masses co-exist with
what might be called the ghosts of forms, painted not with
pigments but with clear varnish, which imprint the canvas
with a kind of afterimage rather than form itself. Beattie’s
judicious handling of these different approaches imbue his
paintings with a particular authority.
One can measure what is there on the surface against one’s
own body, and recognise the disposition of the painted
elements in terms of physical reach and actual distance. The
space in the paintings is a matter of fact as much as it is an
illusion of pictorial space; some forms tower above us, while
others appear to have toppled and fallen, or are grounded
on the baseline of the canvas. Space, especially in the newer
works, is often quite literally left blank, - so much empty
canvas between the painted forms.
Yet space or volume in a painting is not measured in square
feet of unprimed, virgin linen, or the mass and weight of a
form calculated in pounds of pigment, or quantity of oil. One
can say, about the forms in the paintings, that this is a square,
or that here stands a lopsided, roughly drawn fragment of a
grid; one can say that this part of the painting is black, applied
over an underpainting in white, or that this area of dirtied
Mars Violet has been brushed on, that these cloud-like grey
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